:format(webp)/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/63302529/gollum_hobbit.0.jpg)
Daedalic Entertainment has announced that it’s working on a new Lord of the Rings action-adventure game that will be released in 2021 for PC and “all relevant console platforms at that time.” The game will be called The Lord of the Rings – Gollum, and will focus on that titular character.
The Lord of the Rings – Gollum will be based on the books by J.R.R. Tolkien, and will follow Gollum’s path through those books, but it “will also explore new events and details” from that journey. So expect something that doesn’t break the story or narrative of the original work, but may add a few things that aren’t discussed directly in The Lord of the Rings.
Carsten Fichtelmann, CEO and co-founder of Daedalic, said the new game will “tell Gollum’s story from a perspective never seen before, in any storytelling medium, all the while staying true to the legendary books of J.R.R. Tolkien.”
The books don’t go into much detail about what Gollum does during his journey to reclaim the ring, although we know he meets Shelob at one point, is captured in Mordor and tortured into revealing who Bilbo Baggins is and where the ring might be. Sauron’s forces later release Gollum, implicitly doing so to track him in order to find the location of the ring.
It’s at this point that Aragorn captures him in the Dead Marshes and, on what must have been an excruciating months-long journey, hogties him and drags him to the court of Thranduil in Mirkwood so Gandalf can question him. Gollum escapes from there again, and holes up in the mines of Moria, where he eventually comes across the Fellowship, starts following Frodo, and, well, you know the rest from the Lord of the Rings movies.
We have few other details about this game, but the original books should give Daedalic Entertainment a fair amount of wiggle room in which to play; the books discuss Gollum through other characters much more often than letting us see his adventure directly.
